Biodiversity Processes

• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 202548816

The key question in this research area is: What are the evolutionary and ecological processes that generate and maintain biodiversity? Understanding these processes requires a solid theory-based approach to integrate across levels of organisation and spatio­temporal scales, combined with experimental platforms and -omics technologies. Work thus far at iDiv has dissected a number of critical processes addressing this question, including the development of agent­based modelling platforms, exploring the role of traits and feedbacks among microbes and plants in determining coexistence, examining co­evolutionary processes between hosts and parasites, and the genomic and biochemical factors that mediate plant­herbivore interactions. Our next challenge is to integrate these approaches and to scale-up - from the genome to the individual and from the individual to the ecosystem and global patterns of biodiversity. We will achieve this through a series of interrelated approaches, which include mechanistic trait­based approaches for understanding patterns of species interactions and coexistence under different physiological and behavioural constraints, detailed -omics studies of microbe­plant and herbivore­plant, and host­parasite interaction networks, complex holobionts, and the roles of (co-)evolutionary processes in modifying and mediating these interactions to drive biodiversity maintenance.

• DFG Programme: DFG Research Centres
• Subproject of: FZT 118: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research - iDiv
• Applicant Institution: Universität Leipzig
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Francois Buscot, until 9/2020; Professorin Dr. Nicole M. van Dam, until 9/2020; Professor Dr. William Stanley Harpole; Professor Dr. Martin Schlegel, until 9/2020